This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett

that in a way I was free, as I imagine anyone who walks away from a crash is free. I didn’t have expectations anymore, and no one seemed to expect anything from me. I believed that nothing short of a speeding car could kill me. I knew there was nothing I couldn’t give up.
    One night, years later, on the other side of the country, I was giving a boring, obligatory dinner party. Among my guests were a man and a woman, both married but living apart from their spouses because of jobs. They must have been paired together at every social outing, though their missing spouses were all they had in common. Late in the evening, the conversation turned to where we had lived in the past. It came out, after a long series of questions, that the woman had been married before, that the husband she had now was her second husband.
    I asked her when she was first married.
    â€œA long time ago.” She waved her hand, indicating somewhere back there. It was a gesture I knew. “Another life.”
    â€œI was married,” I said in solidarity.
    â€œWell, there you go,” the man said. “Two out of three marriages end in divorce. I’m married, both of you are divorced.”
    But the woman had remarried. Where did that leave us? “I thought it was one out of two,” I said.
    And maybe because he was feeling secure with his wife who was a thousand miles away, he shook his head. There can be something cruel about people who have had good fortune. They equate it with personal goodness. “Two out of three,” he said.
    When you think of that statistic, think of me. I’m the one who did it; I divorced. I pulled the moral fabric of this country apart.
    T ime magazine ran an editorial not long after that by a man who cried out for “supervows” in this age of disposable marriages. Supervows would demonstrate a higher level of commitment. They would be part of a more serious ceremony. There would be promises, legal and binding, that the couple would submit to lengthy marriage counseling before divorce, that they would seek divorce only after being married a certain length of time. Divorce, the writer said, had become too easy. Waltz in, waltz out.
    Waltz in, maybe. Make marriage harder if you want to. Outlaw those Vegas chapels with the neon wedding bells, require marriage applications modeled after tax forms, but leave divorce alone. It’s grueling. I have never known anyone who went into a marriage thinking they would have to get out, and I have never known anyone who got out simply. To leave, you have to involve the courts. You have to sue the person you live with for your freedom. You have to disconnect your life from another life and face the sea alone. Never easy, blithe. Never.
    Nor do I think anyone should have to wait three months or six or nine, depending on the state, for a divorce to take effect. Termination is a serious business, but we do not need the state to mandate a waiting period so we can see if we really know our own minds. Three weeks after I left my husband, he called to say I had a week to come home or file for divorce. Oddly enough, I hadn’t even been thinking about divorce; I wasn’t planning any further than five minutes ahead. But since I knew at the end of the week I couldn’t go back, I called a lawyer.
    It turned out my husband was bluffing, thinking that a tough ultimatum would bring me back. When I told him I had filed for divorce, he told me he wouldn’t give me one. He refused to sign the papers. In the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, where we had been living, contested divorces had a three-year waiting period. We would be legally married for three more years. What choice did I have? I settled myself in for the wait, but it wasn’t so long after all. One day about six months later the signed papers just showed up. My life in the mailbox, stacked between catalogues and the electric bill. I never knew what brought on the change of heart. I